Study finds three out of ten Zim children sexually abused

By Jan Raath, HURINet. 20 March, 1997.

Harare. Three out of ten Zimbabwean children can expect to be
sexually abused, according to a report released in the
capital Harare. It also says the incidence is three times
higher than anywhere else in the world.

Psychologists Naira Khan and Kwadzanai Nyanungo uncovered
the startlingly high incidence in a confidential
questionaire they put to 549 Harare high school students.
The research, the first of its kind in Africa and soon to be
published by Harvard University's journal, Social Science
and Medicine, also found that boys are abused as often as
girls are.

They say the rate of abuse contrasts with studies in Europe
and America that have established an incidence of 10 per
cent of children who get molested. It also differs radically
from observations in the Middle and Far East where child
sexual abuse is rare.

Underlying the high incidence is traditional African custom
that regards a girl as marriageable at the age of 12,
condones rape as a "a more serious form of seduction" and
encourages maternal uncles to fondle girls as a form of
socialisation, the researchers say.

Patrick Chinamasa, Zimbabwe's attorney-general, recently
told a conference on the issue of child abuse: "Take a hard
re-look at our culture and you will realise, as I have done,
that our culture has not only turned a blind eye to cases of
child sexual abuse, but has indeed glorified and given
respectability to certain of the child sexual abuses."

The study found that for all but 22 per cent of the abused
children, their experiences were ordeals that persisted for
between six months and six years, some of it starting when
they were four years old. Forty-one per cent of the girls
were raped, and the rest subjected to unwanted touching.

In the boys' case, 55 per cent of the perpetrators were
women. Sixty-four per cent of the male and female abusers
forced the boys to have sex with them. Eighteen per cent of
the boys were raped.

"Some of the questionaires were horrifying," Khan said.

The report cites other widespread evidence of abuse. A 1988
survey found that half of the pregnancies in females under
the age of 24 were to girls younger than 14, and that in 11
per cent of marriages the brides were under 15 years. In
1990, Harare's Genito-Urinary Centre treated 907 children
under 12 years.

And the signs are that abuse is rising sharply. The Harare
magistrate's court shows a steady 40 per cent annual
increase in child rape cases it has heard over the last
three years, reaching 370 last year. Anecdotal evidence from
other researchers is that half of the children turning up
for treatment at some of Harare's municipal clinics have
sexually transmitted diseases.

Almost every day reports appear in the press. This last
weekend's Sunday Mail, the country's largest circulation
newspaper, quotes police as saying that 29 cases of child
rape were reported in the province of Mashonaland East in
the north of the country in January, and another 43 in
February. A teacher is currently on trial here for raping
three primary school girls at once.

Monday's issue of the Herald, the main daily newspaper,
carries two cases, of the rape of a child of eight and
another of three. Harare magistrate William Cutler is quoted
as saying that three quarters of the rape cases in the
Harare court involve children. He said rapists preferred to
abuse children "because they offer no resistance".

Khan and Nyanungo stress that incidents are seriously
under-reported.

Khan will not extrapolate their findings, but their
experiment was repeated in Bulawayo and found that around 28
per cent of children had been abused. Their report also
cites the widely quoted 1994 study by Rebecca Hallahan which
says sexual violence of girls at schools all over
sub-Saharan Africa is endemic.

The evidence explodes the myth of the African child as being
far more secure from the sexual abuse that occurs in Western
countries where children are vulnerable to paedophilia
networks, rogue child molesters and pornographic videos.

Instead, Khan and Nyanungo found that strangers rarely had
anything to do with the abuse. In the case of the girls, 74
per cent of the perpetrators were male relatives, mostly
someone in a parental role, and the rest were teachers. With
the boys, 91 per cent of the abusers were relatives,
teachers or family employees.

Khan says certain aspects of traditional culture "definitely
affect the incidence of child sexual abuse". Much of it is
to do with the male dominated society that regards women and
children as possessions. The situation is worsened, she
says, "by the still existing view that girls in particular,
'asked for it', or 'provoked' sexual assault".

It is also associated with witchcraft, where sex with a
child is used as a charm to ward off evil. In a country with
one of the highest incidences in the world of HIV infection,
there is the increasing use of rape of young girls as a cure
for, or prevention of, Aids.

"We do not take such allegations lightly," Chinamasa told
traditional healers. "We believe there is an unscrupulous
minority among your members who, for the love of money,
prescribe such therapy."

The report says law officers put people complaining of
sexual abuse through such an ordeal, that "we can find no
reason for any family to enter the present system and
report..."

However, in the last year, authorities have become much more
aware of the problem, Khan says, and nearly every police
station now will have an officer trained to handle cases
with senstitivity. Later this year a bill to introduce
"victim-friendly" court proceedings, in line with procedures
developed in Europe and the United States, is to be debated
in parliament.